Richard Bejtlich's blog on digital security, strategic thought, and military history.

Friday, March 16, 2007

USB to Serial Adapter

My new laptop doesn't have a serial port. This is one of the great tragedies of modern laptops in my opinion. At least for situations where I want to connect to the serial port on a server or system with a serial port, I can use a USB to serial adapter like this adapter I bought at NewEgg. I tested it just now by connecting to the serial port on my old FreeBSD laptop.

19 comments:

Thats cool. I had the same problem with my laptop not having a Parallel port. You should remember my rewired SNES controller from back in the BATC days. Well, it requires that a particular pin have a 5V output, which not all parallel ports have. So I tried one of those USB adapters, but it didn't quite work. They make newer USB adapters for these controllers which I may pick up. So be wary, different standards may prevent your setup from working in all scenarios, but at least it is good to know that there is at least a baseline to work from if I ever come across this.

By the way, is that off of a Thinkpad? I noticed a bunch of those at Eclipsecon that had Parallel ports, but no serial port. Strange that the Dells are the exact opposite.

I bought a similar adapter made by Keyspan. The 2.6.x kernel provides support for it, however Debian/Ubuntu disabled it b/c of the licensing model. So I had to recompile the kernel by hand. Not a big deal, but nothing "plug-n-pray" like your experience.

The device now works perfectly with minicom, cu, etc. I did however run into a problem using iWar in analog mode however. I would be interested to know if you get the same results with this adapter.

I blogged (in the link below) about iWar in VOIP mode and plan to write one about analog mode after resolving this issue.

cool, i had done that in windows, so dun have the hassle of entering the commands. of course, i can do it with nix, but i guess the project was urgent during that period of time, so i have to use windows. But well, thats a nice piece of info to have.

Thanks for the article; I didn't know to check dmesg for things like new usb devices. Here I was looking for a linux driver for my Dynex USB to Serial adapter, when all along Ubuntu had plug & played the thing, loaded a driver and stuck it on /dev/ttyUSB0.

I never would have guessed that this adapter would just work after plugging it in. After typing cu -l /dev/ttyUSB0 I was magically connected to my cisco router I had hooked up to it. Amazing. Thanks again.

It's so easy to set up, but i had a little trouble, could you please tell me how can i close a connection, I use to kill the process number but there should be another way to close, because when i connect again it shows a warning message